Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

Ambiguity, my problems make me look the other way … I see, in what the crew did, the usual altruism of the beginnings of a shoot (as if we were mindful of placing ourselves under favorable auspices), but also the technicians’ indirect way of somehow thanking me. They learned of the crisis through my conversation and they were vaguely beginning to forgive my rhythm of work, whose apparent improvisation astonished them.

Ambiguity, I said … That would be the real story: darkness in the humble lodging; myself, entering at night to take away the little girl with her dirty feet and her hands red with henna, the mother overburdened but saying nothing, the next day an ordinary conversation … Then, behind the hedge and because they are affected by this story, the nineteen members of the technical crew (seventeen of them men) would create their own scenario to deal with this long, hard wait for the insurance.

Suddenly this bothers me: Why is it that all these intentions, obviously born of collective generosity, do not result in social aid?

Whereas we, nineteen other people and myself, are coming with a camera, that is, a gaze, that is, “the” Gaze. Whereas what must be caught is the first wrinkle, the whispering at the moment when, like the Ogress in legends, I come to take away the little girl, the beauty with innocent eyes. Whereas the camera must catch the gaze of the widow when, in the morning, she tells about the accident, the husband who no longer provides protection, the boy-child who can only be a temporary defense. The camera has to record the silence of my pupils: when one has nothing to say in the face of misfortune, it is hard not to turn a blind eye oneself when confronted with the other who is blinded by misfortune.

Yet the camera takes nothing. The nineteen people, who should know that they are nineteen facets of the spying eye, feel rather that they are endowed with a kind heart. Like everybody, they have a clear conscience when the widow offers them this “couscous of the sun” with her blessings.

I do not feel my conscience is clear.

Aichoucha, during the next two months, became a smiling dream friend. I frequently caught myself gazing at her, dividing her time as she did between coming to see us work and then dashing off immediately after one of her animals that had strayed. She came and went but stuck to her job of keeping the sheep, observing us afterward without real curiosity but rather with fond indulgence.

She seemed, however, to flit lightly about over us, protectively. Sometimes I wanted her to think of me as one of the sheep; I wanted to feel that it was her responsibility as the shepherdess to look after me when my enthusiasm would go drifting off toward so many different rivers … Aichoucha, the illiterate shepherdess, eight years old, scandalous in today’s Algeria — and this was only seventy kilometers from Algiers. In actual fact Aichoucha is the real outsider in these regions where I think I see the future dawning imperceptibly …

THERE IS ONE NIGHT during the World War — I do not know what year it was — that I want to tell about. Not to begin my memories of earliest childhood, no, this was a night that caused some imperceptible shift in me at the age of three. As if, because of belonging irrevocably to the family community in a colonized country, one consequently split in two, there would be some sort of alarm set off in the consciousness of this entirely Arab little girl. It was only decades later that I would become aware of its subterranean swell.

Let us locate the facts first: I remember this World War as just beginning. Bombing of North Africa by the German air force. Any textbook about this period would give me the precise date, of course — what month in 1940 or 1941, perhaps even later … But I shall rely only on this child’s memory. The scene I want to describe — revive, pass beneath the spotlights, dimmed or blinding, of my sudden new curiosity — this scene takes place in the parents’ room, in this modest apartment in the building where the teachers lived in a village in the Sahel of Algiers.

My bed was also in this bedroom — a deep, narrow bed of wrought iron, which I would later use for the bedroom of the heroine of my film. That is where I slept, at least until my brother was born, the second one, the one who is not dead, younger than I by three years and three months. After that I went back to my paternal grandmother’s bed to be lulled to sleep every evening in her arms, to have my feet warmed in her hands. I know that having been wrapped for several years this way in maternal warmth was like a second birth for me.

The strange night, or rather the almost uncanny way I woke up during this night that I am trying to resurrect, comes therefore before that second period.

There was war, and bombing; I have to have been less than three years and three months old. This gentle, humble grandmother whispering affectionately in the night shadows becomes for me a sort of motionless statue (a female version of one of the lares), standing guard outside of this first memory with its dragging undertow.

There were many bombings earlier during the tumultuous nights of this period: probably ten nights or so over about three months … In the center of the village, between the easy-to-spot church and the bandstand in the public square, not far from the teachers’ apartments — where we were the only “native” family alongside five or six households of French teachers — some bomb shelters had been dug. I can see us all heading for these shelters, a line of about twenty people, in the dark of night barely pierced by the glow of a few candles.

These few expeditions left a cheerful impression on me. Not only was it fun when we had to race to this place close by (because they had dug the trenches in a nearby park) but it was especially so when we were all seated more or less in a circle, finally safe, awaiting the return to calm outside. There was a scattering of other children there; we must have been all wound up because of the completely incongruous protocol that we saw perniciously take hold among the adults. What did we expect other than that the danger would pass? Our village was at the foot of the mountains of the Algiers Tell, the main target of enemy planes for I do not know what strategic installation. My father and two or three other teachers used to remind us of this during the attacks, probably to reassure the ladies. When we left the trenches, it was highly unlikely that we would find our houses destroyed, the village devastated, or that any of the people not, like us, in shelters would be dead …

This line of reasoning, spun out to fill the time as we waited, remains for me a sort of sound sculpture … However, the relations among the adults in this shelter shifts subtly, uneasily in my memory. So I am not absolutely sure whether my mother (then about twenty-one or twenty-two), who at the time wore the veil in the style of city-women, was there dressed in European or Moorish fashion. I have no memory of this detail; writing now, all I would have to do is ask her — she would repair or correct that forgetfulness … I am not doing so because I am trying to discover how it was that I sensed a change, some disorientation in this minisociety.

These parents were seated side by side in couples in a circle. Most of them looked up at the ceiling when there was a pounding dull rumble or the wail of some distant siren.

Snuggled up next to my father, I watched the scene as if it were some sort of suspended theater, noting the presence of my grandmother (she was certainly wrapped entirely in her veils), silent as usual, and my mother, who was so young. Her cautious voice comes through to me clearly. She is speaking to one of the French wives, making conversation, and it is as if I were hearing, for the first time, French words — hesitant, careful, uttered somewhat haphazardly one after the other — as if, in this general swell of fear, what the others felt was in no way comparable to what my mother must have experienced when, through the force of circumstances, she conversed in a language that was not yet familiar and did so to maintain her “social rank.”